"Your 'reality', sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever."— Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen

Friday Free Game: Sushi Go Round
Friday, November 09, 2007

This week's Friday Free Game reminds me an awful lot of Tapper, the classic arcade game the featured a beer tap beside your joystick. You'd have to run from counter to counter, filling frosty mugs and flinging them at customers, but the tricky part was catching the glasses as they threw them back. I personally don't think Tapper gets nearly the respect it deserves. In 1983 it had in-game advertising (Budweiser and Mountain Dew have prominent logos in-game) and compelling casual gameplay, including a mini-game bonus round. It's one of my favorite of the classic arcade games.

This modern-day, Flash equivalent is called Sushi Go Round. Customers appear and demand different kinds of sushi. You have to assemble the rolls from the proper ingredients and send them down the conveyor belt to them. Just to make your life difficult, this sushi bar is a one-man show: you are the production-line sushi chef slinging the fish, the beleaguered manager re-ordering fish eggs to stay ahead of customer demand, and you're even the busboy. You have to click on the plates to clear them for new customers.

Each round introduces a new kind of sushi that you have to remember how to make, but remembering the sushi recipes is the easy part. The game gets hard as you juggle the making and ordering, and it generates that same kind of tension that Tapper did as you find yourself going back and forth, barely keeping up as the game throws obstacles at you. The game is a lot of fun for a few plays, but I found myself wishing they had simplified the sushi-reordering part a bit more. But the system hangs together nicely, and Sushi Go Round is liable to keep you busy for a few hours if you're not careful.

The Red Bull Diary is the personal pulpit and intellectual dumping-ground for its author, an amateur game designer, professional programmer, political centrist and incurable skeptic. The Red Bull Diary is gaming, game design, politics, development, geek culture, and other such nonsense.